It is known that plants in for example process industry typically comprise a larger number of meshed sub-parts. A sub-part of a plant is normally related to a sub-task of the whole production process, such as mixing a substance for further production. Since such sub-tasks often are rather independent from other sub-tasks up to a certain degree, the respective sub-parts of plants are often planned independently each from each other and even might be realized by different sub-suppliers. Also respective control systems are typically planned independently from each other, are related to a respective sub-part of a plant and are meshed together to a complex control network for the whole plant in the final engineering phase.
Thus, complex network solutions and distributed control systems are nowadays highly required in process industries, including a lot of different fieldbus systems, controllers, server and workstation PCs, process control software, devices and many more parts that are very complex to engineer, manage and maintain. In addition, the complexity of process plants increases. This makes the solutions very hard to handle and, of course, costs a lot of time during engineering. The rising complexity of process plants and the simultaneously decreasing time for automation engineering evolves the requirement for a higher degree of automation in engineering.
Known approaches for engineering of complex network solutions for plants have in common that they are based upon a computer interpretable (semi-) formalized information representation from the process engineering and front-end engineering and design phases. Although there are standardized—and more or less formal—formats available and there are well structured methods for data exchange published, the process specification is not provided in a standardized computer readable format. Such standardized formats are for example                CAEX—IEC62424,        AutomationML—IEC62714 or        XMpLant—ISO15926.        
The interface between automation engineering and process engineering across different departments or even company borders is usually not implemented in a structured manner, but the specifications are either printed on paper or in a standard computer storage format such as “PDF” or “JPG” and exchanged in that manner. Thus model data of a plant describing its overall functionality or even the topology of a single sub-part of a plant are typically available—if at all—in the final end of the engineering phase.
Disadvantageously within this state of the art is that—without having model data of a plant available already in an early stage of the engineering process—an overall consideration of a complex production plant over all its sub-parts is not possible. Thus potential faults in the design of a sub-part of a plant will be detected—if at all—in a rather late stage of an engineering project.